Dr. Metablog

Dr. Metablog is the nom de blague of Vivian de St. Vrain, the pen name of a resident of the mountain west who writes about language, books, politics, or whatever else comes to mind. Under the name Otto Onions (Oh NIGH uns), Vivian de St. Vrain is the author of “The Big Book of False Etymologies” (Oxford, 1978) and, writing as Amber Feldhammer, is editor of the classic anthology of confessional poetry, “My Underwear” (Virago, 1997).

DR. METABLOG’S
GREATEST HITS

  • Wisdom

    I've reached the age when, neuroscience claims, the "wisdom centers" of the brain (the anterior cingulate and ventromedial prefrontal cortices) are supposed to leap into action. Do they? Tell truth, I don't know. Have I, without awareness or drama, metamorphosed from a jejune larva, dull as dishwater, into a butterfly of wisdom? When did it happen? At this moment or writing, I confess that I feel less wise than tired.  

    Nevertheless, let me offer, with maximum diffidence, a few homemade aphorisms and sententiae. Whether they amount to wisdom, and whether they do credit to my anterior or prefrontal lobes, my loyal readers will have to decide.  

    A) "Nothing ever happens until it happens." This proverb is slightly gnomic, so let me gloss. If you assume that just because you've carefully planned your trip to Tahiti or your visit to the new restaurant or even your outing to the local barbershop that it's going to happen, you might be in for disappointment. Wait until you're there before you get excited. There's many a slip twixt the cup and the lip. Rejoice appropriately — when it's time. By doing so, you avoid elation deflation. 

    B) "No one knows what's going on between two people, even if you're one of them."  I think this proverb is eminently self-explanatory. It applies mostly to marriage but equally so to all dyadic relationships. Even between you and your dog.

    C)  "The only people who idealize the past are those that know nothing about it."  Slavery, plague, torture, injustice, famine, rapine, brutality, poverty, starvation. Etc.

    D) "You're immortal until the day you die." Of course you are and don't let the nay-sayers and "realists" bother you.

    E)  "Religion: my Prince of Peace can beat up your Prince of Peace." Tribalism sucks.

    F)  "Enough is as good as a feast, and often better." Figurative meaning: a modest sufficiency is all that is needed for a happy life. Literal meaning: one hamburger (or half a hamburger) lies more easily on the stomach than two or three. And hold the fries.

    G)  "The secret of life is to turn routines into rituals."  Self-explanatory, I think. Make a fuss about that glass of wine at four o'clock. Savor it.

    H)  "The longer something has been believed by mankind, the less likely it is to be true."  See C above.

  • Durocher 1947

    In 1975, Leo Durocher wrote an as-told-to autobiography called Nice Guys Finish Last. I read every word of it, but I got to tell you, it's not a good book. It's a piece of self-justifying pro-Durocher propaganda. It's argumentative, hyperbolic, unreliable. Durocher was an irascible man: he got into fights with sportswriters, players, umpires, owners, coaches, wives — everyone he encountered. In every single case, he was absolutely blameless and they were absolutely wrong. The gambling that got him suspended for a year? — why, it never happened.

    Durocher doesn't give it the emphasis it deserves, but he had, by accident, a place in the story. Durocher was manager of the Dodgers when Branch Rickey hired Jackie Robinson. It was a watershed moment, a supremely important step in the civil rights movement, and the beginning of a major transformation of not just baseball, or sports, but of the nation and the world.

    Durocher played his part, and he's proud of it, but I can't help feeling that he missed his moment. His vision was so narrow, so constricted, so unaware. I suppose he should be commended for doing the right thing, but as far as I can tell, he did it for trivial reasons and did not have a glimmer of understanding of either oppression and injustice on the one hand, or equality and freedom on the other.

    When some Dodgers proposed to petition Rickey not to sign Robinson, Durocher called a team meeting. Here's what he says that he said to them:

    "I hear some of you fellows don't want to play with Robinson and that you have  a petition drawn up that you are going to sign. Well boys, you know what you can do with that petition. You can wipe your ass with it. Mr. Rickey is on his way down here and all you have to do is tell him about it. I'm sure he'll be happy to make other arrangements for you. I hear Dixie Walker is going to send Mr. Rickey a letter asking to be traded. Just hand him the letter, Dixie, and your'e gone. Gone. If this fellow is good enough to play on this ball club — and from what I've seen and heard, he is — he is going to play on this ball club and he is going to play for me. I'm the manager of this ball club and I'm interested in one thing. Winning. I'll play an elephant if he can do the job, and to make room for him I'll send my own brother home. So make up your mind to it. This fellow is a real great ballplayer. He's going to win pennants for us. He's going to put money in your pockets and money in mine. And here's something else to think about when you put your head back on the pillow. From everything I hear, he's only the first. Only the first, boys. There's many more coming right behind him and they have the talent and they're gonna come to play. These fellows are hungry. They're good athletes and there's nowhere else they can make this kind of money. They're going to come, boys, and they're going to come scratching and diving. Unless you fellows look out and wake up, they're going to run you right out of the ball park. So I don't want to see your petition and I don't want to hear anything more about it. The meeting is over. Go back to bed."  

    To me, his speech, though apparently effective, is trivial — an opportunity wasted. He opposed the petition for three reasons: one, it defied authority (his and Rickey's); two, Robinson is going to help us win and therefore make us money, and three, there are "others" on the way, who also want to make money, so get out of the way.

    The idea that Jack Roosevelt Robinson and others of his hue should be allowed to participate out of simple fairness and equity did not occur to him. Slavery, racism, segregation, justice, equal opportunity — not part of his thinking. Durocher's awareness of his place in history — zero. What a disappointment!

  • Where I Live: Now

    1655 Walnut Street, Boulder, Colorado. On the second floor, just to the left (as you look from the street) of the main entrance. It's not a handsome building, in my opinion, but the condos are clean and comfortable and new. I've been here since 2009 and plan to stay. Going to go out feet first, as the cliche would have it. There's ample but not too much room and lots of sun (my living room windows are south-facing) and convenience. We're here more than half the year — the rest of the time in Vermont (almost 5 months) and New Orleans (one month during the winter). We're one block off the semi-famous Boulder Mall, with all sorts of foody restaurants that we don't patronize as well as coffee shops and marijuana outlets. There's also an outdoor gear shop every few feet. Things could be worse. 

  • Missing Megafauna

    Many years ago, sometime during the previous millennium, I was taken to an African game park — elephants, rhinoceroses, giraffes, and lions (the hippos were AWOL). It was astonishing to see these huge beasts. I didn't realize at the time that it was semi-miraculous that these creatures had survived to our day, even in a de facto zoo, when so many other massive animals had recently gone extinct. When homo sapiens arrived on the scene, say 50,000 years ago, there were many animals that would have made a zoo park several orders of magnitude more remarkable that the one I visited. Why did these beasts go extinct?  Disease, habitat change, and competition are likely culprits but it's hard to deny that our predatory ancestors must take some of the blame.   

    Yes, the game park had lions, but it would have been infinitely more exciting if it housed not only the African lion, but the European lion which was half again as large and which survived lately enough to be well known to the Greeks.

    Related image

    Other big cats were also missing: the famous saber tooth, everyone's nightmare, as well as the American false cheetah, a cheetah-like cougar weighing 190 formidable pounds. I would also have liked to see the thylacine, the so-called "marsupial lion" or sometimes "Tasmanian tiger" which survived until 1936, late enough to be photographed.

    Image result for thylacine

    I would also have liked to see a cackle of European hyenas. Even more, the two-ton short-faced Bear, with whom our paleolithic ancestors competed, which was three times the size of a modern polar bear. The equally large ground sloth, even the bones of which are impressive.

    Megatherium americanum Skeleton NHM.JPG

    And the sloth lemur, the size of a big male gorilla. The Irish deer, as big as a moose, with an outsized, out-of-proportion rack. Then there were the elephant-like animals: the Columbian mammoth of the American southwest, smaller than its modern African cousin, but with astonishingly curved tusks. The wooly mammoth, surviving until just 3700 years ago on Wrangel Island off the Siberian coast. The straight-tusked elephant, two or three times the size of modern African elephant. The North American mammoths. And also Cuvier's gompothere, which looks like an elephant but isn't one, but which was seven feet tall at the shoulder and which lasted until about 14,000 years ago:

    And along with them, the morningstar-tailed glyptodon, a five thousand pound armadillo: 

    Image result for morningstar tailed glyptodon

    I would have loved to cast my eye on the diprotodont, the largest known marsupial, which weighed in at three tons and lived until 45,000 years ago

    Image result for giant diprotodon

    The wooly rhinoceros, as large as a diprotodont. The sivathere, an odd-looking  giraffid. The tree kangaroo. The short-faced kangaroo, three times the size of any living kangaroo.

    And right there in Vermont, rustling and stomping in the forest, were the stag moose and Jefferson's ground sloth and the long-nosed peccary and Harlan's musk ox and the Vero tapir and the giant beaver, all recently gone. (You wouldn't have wanted to come face-to-face with a giant beaver. Or swim in its pond, if it made ponds. You'd be better off listening to it slapping its tail in a game  park.)

    Figure 4: A scaled cartoon showing the size of the largest Giant Beaver, relative to an adult human. Image from prehistoric-wildlife.com

     And then there were some true avian oddities worth taking a gander at: the flightless moas of New Zealand, the female at 440 pounds, two-and-half times the size of the male. The cursorial owl, a three-foot tall flightless owl, which pursued its prey afoot. Haast's eagle, with a wingspread of seven and a half feet. The five hundred pound Elephant Bird, which survived in Madagascar until a thousand years ago. 

    And then the tarpan, the warrah, the toxodon. Strangest of all, macrauchenia, a three-toed ungulate not closely related to anything alive today, which looked something like a humpless camel with a droopy snout and which was around until about 10,000 years ago. 

    It would have been quite a show if these animals had survived. Well worth the price of admission. 

  • Where I Lived (VI)

    From 1965 to 1969, from my 26th to 30th year, I lived at 215 West 91 Street on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, first in a 4 room apartment on the 6th floor and later in a 5 room apartment on the 5th floor. Two babies came home to this place.

    It's called a "beaux arts" building and dates from 1917. It hasn't changed much if at all in the last 50 years though it's gone from rental to coop. (I've written about the changes to the Upper West Side elsewhere.) There was nothing distinguished about the building or our two apartments but they were spacious and serviceable. I liked Riverside Park, just two blocks to the west, which was an excellent place for infants. Central Park, a few blocks to the east was off limits in the 60s because of the druggies and general violence.  
     
    We made friends. We took as much advantage of the cultural amenities as our limited budget and intense schedules would allow. I wish to heck that there hadn't been an always-on-duty exhibitionist right across the air shaft from our kitchen window. 
     
    I do not have very good memories of this place. I was not happy with the state of my employment. I loved the boys but they were hard work and the neighborhood was inconvenient for children. And society was in an uproar because of the foolish destructive Vietnam war. I was glad to leave this place behind. I think my happiest days were the days spent packing up, getting ready to go.  And then driving the Dodge across the country to Colorado.

  • For My Grandchildren: Your Great Grandmother and her Siblings

    Dear Talia, Oliver, Ella, Lola, Luke, Caleb, and Asher: 

    Here's a picture of your great grandmother, Anne Krull Goss (1912-2009) with her siblings.

    Akgsibs1
    Anne is the pretty young blonde woman, second from the left. She's the oldest.

    The picture was taken during the World War II years, '42 or '43. On great grandma's right is her brother Jack, whose tank was hit by cannon fire. He was the only survivor of his crew and spent many months recuperating in an army hospital. On her left is Hy, who was exempted from service, if I remember correctly, because his business was declared an essential industry. On Hy's left is your great-great aunt Frieda. Frieda's fiance (a soldier who was named Aubrey, but I don't know anything else about him) was killed in Europe. On Frieda's left is Mendy, the youngest, who was a bombardier on a B-24.

    The war disrupted many lives, not only those who served but those who stayed at home.   

    I've been lucky — too young for Korea and too old for Vietnam. I hope you are similarly lucky.  Better than that —  I hope these endless wars in which we're engaged (in Afghanistan and Syria right now) come to an end.

    Grandma Anne contributed 1/8 of your genetic inheritance. The people depicted here might seem to come from the remote past, but be aware that they're in you, part of you. 

  • Where I Lived VII

    Image result for 1051 10th Street, Boulder, CO

    From 1973 until 2009, this was the place. My longest stay in one location and the childhood home of my children. The house had good bones, as they say, when we arrived and was well worth the $46,500 that we paid for it. But the innards had been remodeled into oblivion. Green shag carpet covering the lovely oak floors; slick craftsman woodwork covered with white paint; stained-glass window replaced and disfigured with a beaded curtain in the style of a New Orleans whorehouse; flocked wall paper; some sort of plastic substance glued onto the pine kitchen floor; and a kitchen untouched since 1917 and hopelessly out of date. It took years to get it into shape, but by the time we left, it was looking mighty fine. I was sad to leave but the time had come to move on.

    I still miss the colorful spring garden, stocked with peonies both herbaceous and tree, day lilies, irises, a lovely weigela, and a wall of clematis. 

  • The Precious Gift of Atheism

    Although my parents were pure and perfect atheists, they did not advertise their atheism or disparage the religions of others — at least not in my hearing. They were exactly the opposite of what is sometimes called "militant atheists." To be militant would have been to give religion too much regard, too much importance — and they wouldn't have bothered. To the best of my recollection, they were utterly indifferent. In our house, it was as if theology and worship had never been invented, practiced, or pondered. While my parents didn't enforce or evangelize their views upon their children, their unconcern, their lack of interest, was eloquence enough. Of course my brothers and I grew up to be atheists, and have remained so. Peaceful and positive atheists.

    My parents were both readers. Every Tuesday my mother trundled over to the McDonald Avenue branch of the Brooklyn Public Library and trucked home a shopping basket full of books. There were volumes of all kinds — mostly fiction and mysteries for my mother and, for my curiosity-driven father, politics, law, science, history, art, and of course, gardening. But I never saw a book on religion. Not a one. In their bookshelves at home, I remember only one volume that might have touched on the subject. It was a collection of essays by the Freethinker Robert Ingersoll. 

    I was young boy, perhaps 10 or 11, when I overheard some friend or acquaintance of my mother say something to her about prayer, or putting faith in the lord, or some such platitude. She waited politely until the person departed and then turned to me and murmured, quietly, "Well, I suppose some people need a crutch."  I think that's the sum of all I ever heard from her on the subject of religion. One might think that the dismissive term "crutch" hinted at disdain or superiority (they need crutches but we don't) but it was not so. My mother's observation was made without prejudice or judgment. 

    Where other households might have worshiped or wondered or discussed, for us there was absolutely nothing. Religious education?  None, not a drop. In our home, there was no attendance at temple, mosque or tabernacle, no religious ceremonies, and not even a Bible. I can remember my father and me dribbling our basketball to the schoolyard to shoot some hoops. When we passed the local orthodox synagogue, my father said, "Bingo.They play bingo in there." But he was not condemning the religion. It was the gambling. He disapproved of gambling (even Bingo) and the idea that a religious institution would allow gambling every Tuesday night offended him deeply. 

    When I was a questioning adolescent, out of a spirit of curiosity and perhaps rebellion, I liberated a bible from our local public library and secreted it under my treasured collection of Mad magazines. While others of my age cohort were squinting at smuggled Playboys or at The Amboy Dukes under the blankets by flashlight, I was acquainting myself with the holy scriptures. In my ignorance, I thought of the bible as a forbidden book, one which my parents would have disapproved. But I was wrong. They wouldn't have noticed; they wouldn't have cared. Looking back, I'm sure that they knew about my thirst for forbidden knowledge and probably enjoyed a giggle at my expense. Many years later, when my father was a widower, I gave him a copy of an annotated, edited Bible that I used as a textbook in one of my literature courses. Did he disapprove?  Not at all. He said, "It's interesting."  But of course he read it not as an inspired text but as history and as fiction. 

    To have been raised in such a household was my good fortune. My atheism was an unearned gift. I got it free, and I'm perpetually grateful. Many of my friends, growing up in religious families, have struggled to achieve atheism — often with painful inner conflicts and anger and resentments. I admire them for the strength to break free — especially those that live with irreparable breaches to the family. I endured no such struggle. 

    Philosophically speaking, it's been an easy life. There's a clarity about atheism. It's based in reality, not (dare I say what my parents wouldn't!) in wish and myth and superstition. Atheists, I think, are afforded a purer appreciation of human achievement and a clearer, less conflicted understanding of health, disease, and death. Reason and the evidence of the senses may not always lead to perfect understanding, but they're the best tools that we have, and we must cherish them.   

  • Our Local Gunslinger: Tom Horn

    When I was a Brooklyn 'yoot', back there in the 40s and 50s of the previous century and millennium, Saturday afternoon movies at the Leader Theater were all Westerns. Randolph Scott in his sombrero, Debra Paget in her Apache buckskins, gunfights, bar brawls, cavalry charges, dreaded Comanches shooting arrows into circled Conestoga wagons or falling picturesquely from jagged cliffs, and horses, horses, horses. But what, out of all these recollections, is most memorable?  Without doubt: the landscape. Majestic purple mountains, icy rivers, extraordinary rock formations, big sky. That was the West as I imagined it.  
     
    Now I live in colorful Colorado, and I've never thrown (or witnessed) a chair thrown through a barroom mirror. Not a single quick-draw pistol duel, no cavalry. Not a whit of the mythologized movie West. But the mountains persist. In fact, I can see a splendid hunk of the Front Range  right now out of the window of my downtown condo. Right over my right shoulder as I type this.
     
    It's not only the mountains that survive from my childhood movie-going. Right down the street, in the Columbia (aka Pioneer) Cemetery lie the remains of one of avatars of the western myth. Right here, abutting Flatirons Elementary School, where all my children learned to read and write, lie the bones of the outlaw, bushwacker, crack-shot hired gun, murderer Tom Horn, hanged in Cheyenne, Wyoming in 1903.
     
     
    Picture of

    Although he has been mythologized, he was real. Here he is in the photographic flesh, perhaps weaving the rope by which he was famously hanged. 

    Thomas “Tom” Horn, Jr

    And here's the movie version: Steve McQueen, slightly more glamorous.

    Image result for steve mcqueen tom horn

    My earlier self, the Brooklyn 'yoot', would have been happy to know that I now live only a few feet away from the mythical gunslinger.

  • Debra Paget Then and Now — Broken Arrow (1950)

    Image result for debra paget images

    In 1951, when Broken Arrow hit the Leader Theater on Coney Island Avenue, I was just an ungrown twelve-year-old. I wasn't an assiduous movie-goer because weekends were for basketball and softball, but when I did invest my 14 cents in a matinee, it was for a Western  – not for a soppy musical or scary crime film. Last night, for the first time in 67 years, I watched Broken Arrow again. I imagined that I would remember it clearly.

    Hold on, let me be scrupulously honest here. I didn't pretend that I would remember the entirety of the film, not even the plot. I knew only that Sanseearah, the Indian Maiden "Morningstar" as portrayed by Debra Paget, was incised into the deep fabric of my brain. She, Debra that is, might have been my greatest crush or first true love. And why shouldn't she have been? Just direct your admiring gaze to the still above. Miss Paget was young, lovely, exotic as all get out, and yielding. I admit with chagrin that I didn't fully understand what got me so het up about her in 1951, but het up I was.

    But all is changed, now, almost three generations later. What was "hot" and romantic then seems more than a little creepy now. Debra Paget (or DebraLee Griffin, of Denver, Colorado) was only sixteen years old when the film was shot. Sixteen! Moreover, she plays younger. In fact, the film devotes several long scenes to Morningstar's  puberty rites — so perhaps she's imagined to be thirteen. (The head dress that she wears in the picture below as well as the rest of the ceremony, was, I am sure, what is now called "fakelore.")

    Image result for broken arrow film 1950 images

    Look at her. The poor dear is barely out of childhood. Mr. Stewart (James Stewart, her graying white mountain-man suitor) was forty-two years old, and looks every bit of it. How can we, how did we, not notice the age difference? Why is he attracted by a child?  I tried hard to suspend disbelief, but my powers of suspension are not infinite. The film, I'm sorry to say, teeters into unsavory child-molesting territory.  

    My pre-adolescent fascination with the film has now been altered, dampened and dispatched.

    It's a shame, too, because Broken Arrow was a self-consciously progressive film in which the Apaches were figured not as brutal savages but as human beings. It deserves high praise for its groundbreaking stance. The film was written by the leftist Albert Maltz, of Brooklyn, New York, who was one of the Hollywood Ten, and who, on the day I saw Broken Arrow for the first time, was in jail serving a one-year sentence for refusing to cooperate with the runaway House Un-American Activities Committee. 

    I therefore wish that the film hadn't been compromised by the March-October love affair. And that Albert Maltz hadn't side-stepped the real difficulties of an interracial marriage in the 1880s by allowing Dear Debra to be murdered.    

    And while I'm wishing, I wish also that the authorities at Twentieth-Century Fox hadn't insisted that the two most important Apache roles be played not by Apaches but by whites. Debra Paget is the one lead, while Cochise, the Apache chief, was played in redface by Jeff Chandler, formerly Ira Grossel, a graduate of Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn, New York. It's not as though more appropriate actors weren't available. In fact, the character of Geronimo, who has one brief speech, was played by an uncredited Jay Silverheels, an accomplished actor of Cayuga and Mohawk heritage.

    But would we, in 1951, have been able to empathize with real Apaches, genuine Apaches, rather than with familiar faces in heavy makeup? Or would such Indians have been, even for liberals, too "other," too foreign?

  • Where I Lived (V)

    1521 9th, Boulder, CO 80302
    Here's a picture of the house in which we lived from 1969 to 1973. It's 1521 9th Street in Boulder, Colorado. It's a small, old Craftsman, probably right out of the Sears, Roebuck catalog, which retained, in those years, many of its original dark-wood-and-stained-glass beauties. It was good to us but there weren't enough bedrooms for a young family of five. The rent was so low ($130 a month) that we were able to save a few dollars for a down payment on larger quarters. 
     
    The photograph comes from a real estate advertisement. 1521 is up for sale for (gasp) $1.3 million, ten times what it sold for in the '80s.  
     
    We had rented the place sight unseen and then in August drove the Dodge across the country. I remember how excited we were to arrive at such a handsome respectable home after four years of apartment living. I loved the house and would have bought it, but in the summer of 1972, when we returned to Boulder from Vermont, it was clear that we couldn't fit comfortably into such crowded quarters, however beautiful.
     
    So we started the search.  The offspring were unanimously adamant that we must remain in the Flatirons Elementary School district. They were so wise.
     
    Warm memories of 1521. It was this house that welcomed Eve in June of 1970.

  • Written in 2009 and Republished Today, as Relevant Now as Then: As Time Goes By

    Two nights ago [this would be October of 2009, of course], I watched the Phillies trounce the Dodgers, 11-0. What a colossal drubbing! HDTV let me appreciate Cliff Lee's southpaw masterpiece in exquisite detail. But for me the most memorable moment of the evening wasn't Lee's artistry or 270-pound Ryan Howard's mad-dash triple to right. Instead, it was the discovery that the Phillies'  lanky, awkward-but-effective scraggly-bearded right fielder Jayson Werth sports a noteworthy baseball pedigree. His grandfather was Ducky Schofield, a good-field no-hit infielder from the 1950s — from the days, that is, of my golden youth. Holy jumping jiminy! I saw this young feller's grandpappy play! 

    Youch!  More evidence, as if more were needed, of my long-in-the-toothedness.

    Why should I be surprised?  I went to my first baseball game in 1946 (at Ebbets Field — Cardinals 3, Dodgers 1).  Before there was TV. I've been attending to the game for 63 years. Close to three generations.  [Nine more years have passed since I first wrote this;  so 72 years now.]  

    I've grown accustomed to father-son combos. Bobby and Barry; the Griffeys (who once played together in the same outfield); Felipe and Moises; huge Cecil Fielder and his even more enormous son, Prince; the Hundleys, the Stottlemyres, and many, many others. Sometimes while I'm watching a game I lose track of time. Eric Young, Jr. looks and runs so exactly like his father that it's easy to fall into flashback mode. I remember a game in which Pedro Borbon came in to relieve. Holy moly, I said to myself — he's a right-handed pitcher. Why the heck is he throwing with his left hand?  Then after a few seconds of complete bafflement it came to me: Pedro Borbon, Jr. I had simply lost twenty-five years — a phenomenon to which your "mature" brain is occasionally and increasingly prone.

    Jayson Werth isn't even the sole grandson. Aaron Boone's father was the catcher (and manager) Bob Boone and his grandfather was the Cleveland infielder Ray Boone, whom I also saw play, but only on the TV. And then there's the Bell family: grandsons David and Mike, father Buddy, and grandfather Gus, a big hitter with Cincinnati during the Ducky Schofield years.  

    So here's the question. Will I hang around long enough to watch the great-grandsons play? Is Jayson Werth fertile?  Does he have any kids?  Are there any budding Boones or baby Bells waiting in the wings?

  • Horrors of Hellenism

    I've been reading about the death of Alexander at the beginning of the Hellenistic period. It's all new to me, and much of it is fascinating, especially about cultural matters, but there's also page after page of difficult-to-retain accounts of warfare and of particular battles. Here's an example of the kind of material that takes up three-quarters or perhaps even 80% of the book.  

    "The two armies faced each other quite conventionally, with the phalanx composed mostly of Lysimachus' and Cassander's troops confronting Antigonus'  phalanx. On their right, Seleucus and Lysimachus stationed a vast mass of Seleucus'  light infantry; on the left was their heavy cavalry commanded by Seleucus' son Antiochus.  Confronting Antiochus was Demetrius in command of Antigonus'  heavy cavalry. As the battle commenced, Demetrius and his cavalry charged Antiochus and drove the enemy cavalry off. Demetrius proceeded to commit the worst blunder a cavalry leader can commit: he over-pursued, leaving the main battle well behind, instead of turning to attack the enemy infantry from behind. As soon as Demetrius had disappeared in the distance, Seleucus brought forward four hundred war elephants and placed them as a screen between Demetrius and his path back to the battle. Meanwhile Lysimachus' phalanx came to grips with that of Antigonus, and Seleucus led his light cavalry in an outflanking maneuver to attack Antigonus' infantry from behind…."  Etc. 

    Exactly what is at stake in this war? The historian (Richard Billows, Before and After Alexander [New York, 2018]) leaves us rather in doubt. He puts no emphasis on the usual economic or ideological issues; the struggle seems to be entirely about personalities. Will the kingdom be ruled by Lysimachus or Demetrius, by Antiochus or Antigonus?  It doesn't seem to matter, either to me or to the historian.

    But what of the soldiers?  Whether on one side or the other, they're likely to be impaled by the dreaded Macedonian larissa, trampled by horses, or squished by elephants. For what purpose?

    I think that at one point in my life I might have been intrigued by these dynastic struggles, but now, what I feel most strongly is sympathy for the ordinary soldier and sorrow for the stupidity of my species.

  • Where I Lived (IV)

    378 Broadway in Cambridge, Massachusetts from 1960 to early in 1962. It was a two-family frame house in which the second floor had been turned into two apartments. We were in one of them, a bedroom, a living room with a kitchen and a detached bathroom down the hall. Perfectly fine for a newlywed graduate student. The newlywed neighbors, Adi and Rutty, are still friends; their daughter, Zerlina, born in April of 1961, was the first child I held in my arms (as an adult). But there was a conflict with the puritanical small-town Irish Catholic landlady because we had allowed a friend to stay in the apartment while we were away "and he brought a woman in." So we moved to a university-owned apartment house on Irving Street, between Cambridge and Kirkland, despite the fact that it raised our rent from $90 a month to $105. We bought a second or third or fourth hand bed for $25 and a rug for $10. It was a serviceable apartment that seemed like luxury after the decrepit Ithaca digs. We stayed until the summer of 1965 when we lit out for Manhattan.  

  • Where I Lived (III)

    Some childhood summer residences.  

    1944: my mother had surgery (I was never informed what sort — such things were kept secret in those days — but I suspect a hysterectomy) and I was sent to live with my grandmother Sonia, who rented or owned a house near Monticello, New York. It was a plain wood-shingled house and I believe that Sonia used it as an informal hotel or b&b. I don't remember much at all except that she tied a long string to a light bulb over my bed and instructed me to pull it if I needed help during the night. Help? Though only 5, I considered myself quite self-sufficient.

    1945: my parents rented a summer home on Glen Lake in the Catskills. It was a house without indoor plumbing. I have a vivid memory of the outhouse, which frightened me because you could look into the hole and see your and your parents' deposits. I remember with more pleasure the pump in the kitchen through which we drew our water. Sometimes I was allowed to prime the pump by pouring a glass of water down its mouth. In August, the war ended and people who owned motor boats were zooming around the lake, shouting. I asked my father what was going on and he said, "the war is over."

    1947, 1948, 1949: the best part of my childhood. Three long idyllic summers on Makamah Beach near Northport, N.Y. I have written about this elsewhere.

  • Where I Lived (II)

    Between 1956 and 1961, I lived in five different places in Ithaca, New York: four bad, one good.

    The first was a cinder-block dormitory room, less a home than a cell, which I shared with a young guy from Virginia who was a not only a smoker but a classic Southern bigot of a type that's pretty much extinct nowadays. No doubt he's changed and matured, but our paths have not crossed these last sixty years. We were both very young, but I was much too young. Childish, when I'm honest with myself. The following year — 1957-58 — I lived in a basement apartment in a building that was known locally as the "Indian Embassy" because the upper three floors were all inhabited by men (no women, not a trace of them) from the subcontinent. The odor of garam masala and turmeric, much more exotic then than now, regularly drifted into my apartment. I remember that my kitchen, which I rarely used, was unheated and that it was not unusual to find in midwinter a pot or pan of water, left in the sink, frozen into a block of ice. If the city of Ithaca had any zoning laws, and enforced them, the owner of my apartment, Miss Emily, would have been exiled to Siberia. In my third year in Ithaca I lived in still another beaten-down house on College Avenue. It was also unfit for adult habitation but had a functioning kitchen — it's there that I learned to cook my own food. In my senior year, I lived in a real apartment — four bedrooms, three roommates, including one who has remained a lifelong friend. I should have noticed, but I didn't, that the fourth floor of an ancient building made entirely of wood, with no fire escape, was dangerous. It was a firetrap and although I survived, the building didn't, and was demolished a few years after I graduated — and left the southern tier for good.   

    My favorite residence during the Ithaca years came during the summer of 1961, when, fleeing graduate school in Cambridge and still attached to Ithaca, we (my bride and I) sublet a small (very small house — essentially a single room that served as both living room and bedroom) — at 148 Snyder Hill Road. It was my first experience of living in "the country." There was a cow next door! When I returned to Ithaca in 1992 for my daughter's graduation from Cornell, my house had disappeared and the fields were filled with acres of rich suburban homes — large lots, big lawns, clean, neat and prosperous.

    Our 1961 house, though not more than a tumbledown cabin, gave us a good summer and a good memory. 

  • Where I Lived (I)

    From my birth in 1939 until I left for college in 1956, I lived at 539 East 9 Street in the Flatbush (now gentrified to "Kensington") section of Brooklyn. 539 was a three-story, three-family wood-frame Victorian, which my parents had acquired in 1937 for $4500 — a depression-era fire-sale price financed by my generous "maiden aunt" Mollie. The house was larger and more splendid, I believe, than my father's modest income would otherwise have justified. At first we lived on the first floor and rented floors two and three. Much later, substantially more prosperous, we rented the first floor apartment and lived on the second and third floors in nine spacious rooms, only a couple of which mattered to me.

    Most mysterious was my parents'  bedroom, which was entirely off limits to me and to my brothers Eugene and Jonathan. A forbidden zone. Absolutely taboo. I remember that one time I played some sort of racing or hiding game with one of my brothers and ventured into the room and — horror of horrors  – rumpled my parents' neat bedspread (the bed was always carefully made). It was as if I had robbed a bank or bitten Miss Bildersee, our formidable PS 217 principal. I was severely rebuked and made to swear that I would never commit such an outrageous transgression again. An overreaction by my parents, I knew even then.  

    Nevertheless, I used to sneak into the room when the parents were absent. In one corner hung a picture of my deceased infant sister Susan. Placed on the floor under the picture, was a child-size chair of wood and rush which was venerated even more than the connubial bed. A shrine. I'm sure that the taboo against entering the room was linked to the shrine. Yet to me, the parents' bedroom was not so much holy as it was weird and strange.  

    After my mother died in 1978 my father moved downstairs, abandoning shrine, bed and bedroom. When I visited as an adult, my wife and I would sometimes sleep in what had formerly been the parents' bed. That was mighty creepy and inhibiting.    

    Equally important to me but much more pleasant was my father's small but intensely cultivated backyard garden. He grew roses — hybrid teas, mostly but also a floriferous "Blaze" climber. An apple tree, not very prolific, a Bartlett pear, and a peach tree that was damaged by the hurricane of 1946 and finished off by borers. There was also a patch of perennial sweet peas, a weigela with picotee  leaves, and a fragrant mock orange. But the garden was dominated by Dad's  perfectly tended roses. 

    In 1948 I was allotted a square foot of space in which I planted a single pumpkin seed. The plant transgressed its assigned borders —  which amused me no end — and the single pumpkin that it produced was prizeworthy huge. In subsequent years, I was allowed room to plant and study the habits of old-fashioned annuals: snapdragons, marigolds, zinnias. I saved their seeds over the winter. I now grow those same plants in their modern, much-improved versions. But I don't dare to try roses; that will always be Dad's domain.    

    I think my life would have been very different without the garden. 

    On the whole, 539 was very good to us. After my father died, it was torn down and replaced with an undistinguished apartment house rented by families of Hasids. My very secular father would have been appalled.

    Here's a picture of 539 as it appeared in 1940.  The kid's toy in front of the house probably belonged to my older brother.

    Screen Shot 2019-02-21 at 12.25.31 PM

  • Billy Graham and Me, 1957

    In 1957 (I was 18 and in my second year in college), the reverend doctor Billy Graham led the largest revival meeting in history — an average attendance, in the old-old Madison Square Garden, of eighteen thousand people a night for three months. What was his message?  It was half jingo, half Christian fundamentalism. "Let us tell the world that Americans believe in God, that we are morally and spiritually strong as well as militarily and economically. Let us tell the world that we are united and ready to march under the banner of Almighty God" — not a sentiment that would have been dear to my heart. No Almighty God in my upbringing or anywhere in my brain. 

    Graham was a fervent anti-Communist, but of a sort that left me baffled: "My own theory about Communism," he proclaimed, "is that it is master-minded by Satan. I think there is no other explanation for the tremendous gains of Communism in which they seem to outwit us at every turn, unless they have supernatural power and wisdom and intelligence given to them."  Let me try two non-Satanic explanations for apparent Communist success: 1) "They" didn't outwit us;  in fact, they were dumber than us, overplayed their hand, and collapsed. 2) European and American imperialism had left a mess in the "underdeveloped countries" that was ripe for exploitation.  

    How was a secular partially-educated young fellow supposed to understand such a paranoid, irrational  analysis of world politics?

    With mockery, I'm afraid. Sometime in the middle of the summer of 1957, along with a bunch of wise-ass PS 217 cronies, I took a break from my Sears, Roebuck warehouse job and took the subway to 49th Street to take a gander and a listen to the Crusade for Christ (it was free). What do I remember?  A chorus (probably led by George Beverly Shea but I can't swear to it), bright lights, a cheering, milling crowd. I remember that Billy spoke, but I have no recollection of what he said, though the bronze gong of a voice resounded through the hall. Did he tell us of the five ways that Americans could most effectively combat Communism? By "old-fashioned Americanism" — whatever that was, by "conservative and evangelical Christianity," by prayer, by "spiritual revival," and by "personal Christian experience." All five of which sound pretty much the same to me. And remote from my experience or desires.

    Needless to say, I wasn't his most sympathetic or susceptible auditor.  

    I wonder if he touched on another of his favorite topics that night: that "a woman commits sin when she deliberately dresses in such a way as to entice a man"; "that a wife "should keep herself attractive and give her husband a big kiss when he comes home from the office instead of yelling at him from the kitchen."

    Except for the spectacle, it's all vague in my mind. I do remember, though, that when leaving that Garden I accidentally and momentarily found myself on the line of people who had made a "decision for Christ" and were heading to the podium. That was scary. I beat a quick retreat.  

    I wonder how many other members of the audience were rubberneckers like me. 

    I'm reminded now of the great old gospel song by the Carter Family, "Something Got a Hold of Me."  It's a parable that tells the story of a man who goes to a revival meeting to scoff. "I says I'll go down, take a look at the crowd/  It's just the weak-minded I feel."  But then there's a revelation: "They sing and shout and they all clasp their hands/ And they all got down on their knees./ When the fire fell from heaven it fell upon me,/ And then I fell to the floor." Because

    Something's got a hold of me.

    Yes, something's got a hold of me.

    I have a spirit I'll never forget

    That something's got a hold of me.

    Well, nothing got a hold of me. No fire from heaven, no road to Damascus revelation. If anything, I was confirmed in my scoffery and atheism.

    What did I learn? Not much. At the most, only that if the people who inhabit this country, my fellow Americans, are incomprehensible to me, then it is equally likely that I am incomprehensible to them.

    And frankly, the mysteries that I encountered in Madison Square Garden in 1957 are, sixty years later, still mysterious to this day. Perhaps even more so.

  • Amnesia on Film: Crack-up (1946)

    Ho-hum. Another day, another amnesia movie. 

    Crack-up offers still another variant on this most malleable of diseases: amnesia that is chemically-induced.  

    George Steele (played by too-old-for-the-part Pat O'Brien) presents a danger to a doctor-thief played by reliable Ray Collins. To discredit  him, Steele is kidnapped and injected with "narcosynthesis" which causes him lose his memory and act erratically. Too many silly plot complications and a couple of murders follow, but eventually a second injection brings Steele round.

    I'm not aware of another case of chemically-induced amnesia in film, but I know that there is such a thing in medicine. Propofol and scopolamine are frequently mentioned and I believe that even the common sleeping pill, Ambien, may have amnesiac properties. So there's some limited scientific underpinning for Crack-up's apparently fantastic premise.

    In noir, amnesia is as common as the common cold. In the 40s and 50s, a guy couldn't walk down a louche shadowy city street or take a dame out dancing to  a night spot without encountering half a dozen cases. It was a regular plague. 

    Image result for crack-up film images

  • My Mitt

    My most valuable possession, lifetime, was my baseball mitt. A fielder's glove, not a catcher's or first baseman's. It was, I think, a Rawlings model, and it was inscribed with the name "Monte Pearson." (Pearson had been a pitcher for the Cleveland Indians.)  I remember many hours spent oiling it. I guarantee that it was well cared for.

    In the P. S. 217 neighborhood, to possess one's own baseball glove was a marker of class. When we played, there were never enough gloves to go around, so when our team came in to bat, those who had gloves would leave theirs on the field for someone from the other team to use. Although I never articulated it at the time, it felt downright prosperous to be a lender, not a borrower. I think a good glove cost about $15.00 in those days, so it was no trivial expense.

    When my brother Jonathan, who was three years younger than I, was presented with his glove, he slept with it every night.  I recently asked him if he continued to do so after he was married.  He says no, but….

    I don't think that anyone who didn't grow up in the 40s and 50s in Brooklyn, in the Jackie Robinson era, can appreciate the importance of baseball to us.  

    I've tried to think of another possession that ever meant as much to me — a particular book or an automobile, for instance — but nothing compares. Not even slightly.

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